Summer Time, and the livin' is easy.....

... Fish are jumpin', and so on. In the UK, we have a daylight saving 'British Summer Time' period which lasts from the last Sunday in March to the last one in October, so that the clocks are put forward by an hour in spring and and back by an hour in Autumn. This is a device dreamed up during the First World War in 1916 to increase weapons production, and extended by a double hour during the Second World War for the same reason. Historically, prior to that, 'Greenwich Time' was standard throughout the UK except for Ireland, where a 'Dublin Standard Time', 23 minutes later and astronomically correct for Dublin, was used-this was abolished with the 1916 legislation. Prior to that, the Greenwich Time had been adopted when the builing of railways required a standard national time for timetabling and signalling purposes. Before that, every parish set it's own church or town square clock to midday when the sun was due south, so time varied according to how far east or west of the Greenwich Meridian you were, though places due north or south of each other showed the same times, assuming thier astromomcal observations were correct and their timepieces accurate. I live in Cardiff, where the correct astronomical time is 13 minutes behind Greenwich. In some parts of South Wales, local time is set at 1980.

Between 1968 and 1971, BST time was used experimentally all year to end the confusion caused by the spring and autumn changes, but eventually abandoned due to worries over schoolchildrens' safety in the dark mornings, the sky not starting to get light until nearly 10 am in the north of the country. Ever since, there have been attempts to re-introduce this 'permanent summer' and another is in the parliamentary pipeline now.

Personally, I would like to see the re-introduction of GMT year round (actually, I favour the re-introduction of astronomical time so that it would be easier to use an analogue watch as a compass, but I don't think that is likely), but I do think that there is a case for arguing that the time adopted is irrelevant, just so long as it is the same all year.

Despite being a devout atheist of many years standing, there is something about all this that smacks of humans interfering with god's sublime creation, and we all know where that leads, don't we, children, remember Dr. Frankenstien! (Devon yokel accent) B'aint natrull, oi tells ee. Trouble'll come of it...

This is one of those issues where I find myself in a minortiy of one, like the use of the death penalty for people who park illegally (their car would be crushed on the first offence, and crushed with them in it on the second, no excuses, no trial, no appeal just summary execution). Ok nurse, I'll take the nice medication now...